From Shore to Sea

The transition from Down East Maine’s old-growth hardwood to sod banks and salt hay is abrupt, a jarring shift from dank, muted spaces along the brook to the rolling green, infinite sky and fresh breeze. The ribbon of blue water changes rapidly, morphing from an intimate, rocky stream to a deep trough of harrowing muck.

As I enter the tidal plain, the setting sun cuts rich, golden beams through gaps in the forest, pin-cushioning the world with subtle warmth. I cross the salt hay, then peer over the slippery edge of the sod bank. Below is a lone pocket of gravel, spotted easily in the transparent water. I slide down to stand on this partially submerged island and quickly start to cast, swinging my fuzzy, homemade streamer through a shallow run. I lose myself to the rhythm — cast and drift, drift and cast.

As the day slips away, the first tendrils of the sea start to climb upstream as the tide flips. The pristine fresh water rushing around my knees pushes back defiantly, colliding with the turbid ocean water. Foam and froth swirls and twists, and a jagged, miniscule chop rises at the intersection. Within minutes, the freshwater current from the stream slacks, then reverses, overwhelmed by the tidal flume. I brace against the stronger current, now from the opposite direction, and swing my fly the other way under a blush-and-pumpkin sky.

Just downstream, now up-tide, I see a flash of movement and notice a patch of corduroy water. The activity quickly crescendos, reaching feeding-frenzy intensity. It looks like a school of miniature striped bass attacking spearing, or a roving band of the smallest-ever tarpon feeding on drifting shrimp. Out of instinct, I quickly lift and flick the fly up-current. Whether it’s pure skill or partial luck, I am rewarded with a well-placed cast directly into the melee. The line comes tight immediately, and I let out a whoop of joy. A barred owl responds somewhere in the distance with a series of hoots ending in a trailing vibrato.

The little fish — no more than 7 inches — is quickly overcome. She is thick and tubular, torpedo-like. Her shoulders are rugged and broad. Unique, certainly, but her coloring is what points to her exotic nature. The trout upstream are starkly dark and contrast-heavy, with jet-black eyes and bright-white fin stripes. This fish is muted, washed out, with a clear eye and no noticeable fin coloration. But to call her bland is to call a clear, night sky simply dark. No, this fish shines like mirror-polished chrome, with the subtlest orange and yellow — distant galaxies glimpsed after midnight. This trout is from the sea. While she is technically a common brook trout, there is nothing common about this fish. As I net her, I am overwhelmed with a sense of gratitude, a feeling of uncovering something intensely precious in the tidal waters of Dennys Bay at the farthest reaches of Maine’s Washington County.

Brook trout are a rugged, short-lived char capable of thriving in the smallest cold-water springs and creeks. However, they are not afraid to venture afield — a small fraction of brookies find their way to the sea. These are rare and affably known as “salters.” While it is unclear precisely why some brook trout journey to the sea, water temperature and depth, presence or absence of food, and interspecies competition are all near the top of the list. But just as likely, when the smallest places start to dry up, the sea makes a logical haven for stream trout if they can reach it. That said, biologists simply don’t know what drives some brookies to the salt.

While scientists may not understand exactly why they go, they have proven salters have distinct genetic (or epigenetic) and physiological markers. They’re not a different species, but there is no mistaking a salter from an inland brookie. Salters are generally lighter in color, chunkier and stronger. Yet the vigor of these fish isn’t what makes them special; it’s their splendid, rare nature.

Roaming Brookies

The second salter stream cuts through tens of thousands of acres of dense softwood forest filled with moose and pine martins, and dotted with swamps and beaver ponds. The stream is mostly impossible to fish, but it widens quickly and drops away steeply at the tailwater, dumping into a huge estuary of Cobscook Bay. The steepness is due to several factors, including the massive tide, which runs in excess of 20 feet. At high tide, the water at the foot of the stream is more than 10 feet. At low tide, the estuary completely dries up for nearly a mile from this point. This exchange has dug deeply into the earth, straight through the bedrock, creating beautiful channels and pools that appear as if from another planet.

On this morning in late May, as the tide recedes, I watch a squadron of elvers — juvenile American eels — flitter by in a rush. The composition of the water is slightly brackish now that the tide is half down, but less than an hour ago it must have been close to 100 percent salt water. After the eels comes a rough-looking mob of brook trout; several are scarred, perhaps from osprey attacks. They’re unhurried but move with ominous intent. At the end of the pool, where the stream dumps in, heavy spring flows tumble off ledge-rock creating a vortex. The angel-hair-thin eels are forced to circle back, where the trout cut through them in a final flourish of violence.

The scene repeats continually as I cast from the shadow of a steep bank. The trout ignore everything I offer; I have nothing that looks even remotely like an elver. I plunk myself down petulantly and watch as an age-old drama between predator and prey plays out.

As the tide ebbs, the stream reappears like a spring meadow under melting snow. This is what I’ve been waiting for. The trout here move with the margins of the brackish water and use the emerging structure to ambush clumsy terrestrial, freshwater and saltwater prey. For two hours, I take advantage of this goldilocks water stage. There are trout in every run, cut, turn and drop-off. I land more than a dozen and lose twice as many. They’re nowhere near as chrome as other salters I’ve caught. The color of these trout is a blend between the tar-black, swamp-and-beaver-bog fish, and the polished-pewter seafarers. They are the in-betweeners, belonging not to one place or the other, but actively moving through them both. Tidal brookies by the truest meaning.

The pool at the bottom of this ravine is the widest, deepest spot on the entire stream. The hatching and rising of insects from the surface evokes an image of raindrops going in the opposite direction. For weeks at a time, there is no outlet to the ocean here, but in early spring, and during some king tides and storms, this stream mixes with salt water. For now, in late June under a quarter moon, it is a dead end.

I gingerly toe-heel along the bank, hunched like a stalking cat. My destination is a large rock that forces the current to bend in an arc, an ideal ambush point. A few more seconds of creeping, and I dare not go any farther. I judge the distance and try a bow-and-arrow cast, but I can’t reach. Without moving, I risk an overhead cast — it’s easy to spook the fish with the shadow of my line or a poorly placed cast. To give myself insurance, I replace the 5x tippet and prince nymph with twice the length of 6x and a fluffy green drake. The pattern won’t matter; these fish happily take what they can get.

The first drift is perfect and gets a quick punch from a fingerling. My heart flutters with excitement: life is here. The next cast floats down silently, but the fly is yanked into an eddy and spins out. I wiggle it free and, once downstream, lift it for another quick cast. It lands, moves but a centimeter and disappears. No subtle rise, no vicious splash. It’s just gone in a blink.

This fish erupts from the pool, and time collapses; this is no fingerling. She glides through the air and slides through my dazed mind. Sunlight sparkles off her skin, and I am held in rapture, utterly paralyzed. The surface is broken as she enters again, and the tension sends a shock wave through the rod and my hand. The spell breaks. Gasping, I clumsily rise and stumble into the shin-deep pool. The fight is a frantic, harrowing affair, cliché in all the best ways, and after running frantically up and down the pool, she succumbs and slides to me. Ringed all around with rocks worn smooth by the ocean, I pull her in close. She stares at me, defiant and motionless. I take a moment to appraise her physique and the immensity of her broad tail before capturing her profile with my camera.

-- SUBSCRIBE TO THE ANGLERS JOURNAL NEWSLETTER --

Supporting her 12-plus inches with my palm, I half push, half carry her out into the pool. As I hold her, and as we both recover, I take a deep breath, pulling in my surroundings. I smell the heady air of the northern forest and taste the tang of salt from the tide. The sound of the endless ocean breaking behind, the determined but diminutive stream babbling in front. Here, a trout in my hand that’s so similar but so different than those I caught with my grandfather in the farm country of upstate New York, a world and time away. I have trouble reconciling it all, juxtapositions layering over each other in my mind.

I focus back on the trout — a fish of the past, but one that can represent the future. Muscle and cunning, attitude and moxie. I crack a grin, flatten my palm. She kicks hard, gliding out into the tannic pool. Perhaps to the sea or a mountain spring.

A Salty Past

Salter brookie numbers plummeted throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. They used to be found all over the Northeast, with world-record, sea-run brook trout exceeding 14 pounds taken from Long Island, New York. Sadly, salters have been irrevocably eradicated from the majority of their range and remain under intense pressure where they still have a foothold. The remaining U.S. populations are almost entirely in Maine; the farther east you go, the more likely you are to find them.

Trout are in a race against habitat loss, pollution, climate change and invasive species, but the salter is under even more intense pressure, since the places they live are so few and their populations so small. Additionally, dams and development have been devastating to salters, and Maine makes no harvest distinctions between salters and their ubiquitous inland brethren. The regulations are universal at five fish a day measuring more than 6 inches.

Yet scientists and conservation groups are hopeful that with the continued removal of dams, more specific research on salter biology, a rising public awareness of the need to save native species, and increased catch-and-release, salter brookies can stage a comeback. The typical lifespan of a brookie is less than three years, and salters have been documented to move between salt and fresh water over and over during their short lives. What the average interval is, or what determines it, we don’t know.

Brook trout are profoundly gifted at getting around barriers and can survive for generations where other char would perish in hours. Moving to the sea, from my perspective, seems like it would be the easiest thing in the world for a brookie. We just need to let them do it.